Lula's assault on rural patronage: Zero Hunger, ethnic mobilization and the deployment of pilgrimage

Abstract

This paper explores the Workers’ Party government's attempt to use anti-poverty policy to disrupt rural patronage, and the implications of this effort for theories of patronage. I argue that state officials and race-based activists implementing President Lula's flagship ‘Zero Hunger Program’ (2003–2005) turned mundane program exercises into pilgrimage rites in an effort to build lateral solidarities among Afro-Brazilians and undermine their vertical patronage alliances. The partial success of such efforts suggests that there are circumstances in which vertical and horizontal alliances are compatible, and that investigating this compatibility entails consideration of local categories of exchange.

Keywords:

• Brazil
• zero hunger
• patronage
• clientelism

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Rebecca Tarlau and Anthony Pahnke for organizing this special collection of the Journal of Peasant Studies, and to Gregory Morton for brokering my participation in it. I also thank Rebecca and Anthony for the excellent suggestions they provided in response to a prior draft of this contribution.

Notes

¹Lula released this televised statement as part of a public critique of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso's redistribution measures as mere palliatives tantamount to state patronage. In 2008, the video took on a wide Internet circulation, when Lula's adversaries cited it as evidence of his hypocrisy (titonio2000 2010). The premise of those critiques was that Lula's Bolsa Família program was no different from the ‘food basket and milk distribution’ programs of President Cardoso.

²The choice to launch Zero Hunger in Piauí State made sense in light of two factors: First, the same year Lula of the PT was elected president of Brazil, Piauí's citizens elected a PT governor, Wellington Dias. This meant that Lula had a natural ally and partner to help him implement programs in that state, whereas other Northeastern states were largely dominated by conservative governors who might try to sabotage Zero Hunger or claim credit for it. Second, Piauí is a notoriously poor state, and one that has a large subsistence cultivator population with a relatively small rural proletariat and landless workers' movement. For that reason, the face of poverty in Piauí state was less militant and controversial.

³Leal (1948) and Graham (1990) are concerned with a historically specific (early twentieth-century) configuration of rural patronage in Brazil, one in which local bosses compensated for their declining economic power by channeling state and federal resources to the poor in exchange for their votes.

⁴I am indebted to anthropologist Sidney Greenfield who conveyed this insight to me in a personal conversation in 2011.

⁵‘Food security’ was the more technical organizing term for the Zero Hunger Program. According to the1996 World Food Summit held in Rome in which many Brazilian activists participated, food security refers to a situation in which ‘all people at all times have access to sufficient, safe, nutritious food to maintain a healthy and active life’ (World Food Summit 1996).

⁶Zero Hunger was technically comprised of three pillars: structural, local and emergency initiatives. The key structural initiative was to be a national land reform policy, but the administration never implemented this. The emergency initiatives revolved around food distribution and the temporary cash stipend, Food Card (Cartão Alimentação), which was the only Zero Hunger policy that spread throughout most of the Northeast. The local initiatives included the race-based Quilombola Project discussed in this text, along with a host of small-scale development actions, community gardens, cooperative enterprises, and water infrastructure projects. These were implemented in select locales in tandem with social movements and nongovernmental organizations (Fome Zero 2003).

⁷The term quilombo refers to a community of escaped African slaves or their descendants, while quilombola refers to the people (singular or plural) living in such a community. The term quilombola can also function as the adjectival form of quilombo, as in comunidade quilombola.

⁸Zero Hunger discourse, influenced by the culture of the PT, generally distrusted large institutions, believing that these often tried to control workers and other social movements to the latter's detriment. With regard to social policy, Zero Hunger discourse labeled the initiatives of prior administrations assistencialismo, roughly translatable as ‘welfare statism’, though the Portuguese term critiques the recipients' subordination to the state rather than state waste (Ansell 2014, 29–31).

⁹José Maurício Andion Arruti (1997) explains the contemporary usage of the term remanescente (lit. ‘remainder’) to supplement quilombo/ola, claiming that it ‘arises to reconcile the continuity and discontinuity with the historic past (in a context) in which descent does not seem to offer a sufficient tie’ (21). Its usage, in short, affirms that direct descent is not a necessary criterion to warrant a community's recognition as a quilombo.

¹⁰Many scholars have noted that contemporary Afro-Brazilian communities lack a strong historical memory of slavery or historical quilombola resistance, and thus often do not identify with the contemporary quilombola ethnic category (e.g. Price 1999, 23; O'Dwyer 2007, 45). Scholars and activists have thus questioned the features of social life that motivate a community to ‘assume’ the identity despite this unfamiliarity. These features might include social memory of racial persecution (Oliveira 2010), autonomous (boss-less) labor (Carvalho et. al. in Price 1999, 15), collective land usage bespeaking an ‘intimate … relation with their territories' (Souza 2008, 7), and historical confrontation with the state and private capital (O'Dwyer 2002).

¹¹The English term ‘black’ is often translated into (Brazilian) Portuguese as negro or preto. Preto is often used to describe the appearance of a dark-skinned person, whereas negro is often used to identify that person with the legacy of African slavery. Both are often used in pejorative, racist remarks. It is not so much that either term is a racial slur, but rather that ‘polite talk’ about race entails a kind of discursive lightening of a person being described through the use of terms such as mulato or moreno (brown, brunette). Recently, Brazil's social movements have reappropriated negro as a term of race-based solidarity. Still, both terms are subject to considerable semantic flux. Of course, the nature and dynamics of Brazilian ethno-racial classification is the subject of considerable academic debate (Harris 1956; Wagley 1963; Skidmore 1993; Hanchard 1994; Sheriff 2003; Sansone 2003; Mitchell 2013). Suffice it to say that early twentieth-century celebrations of Brazil's ‘racial democracy’ (usually attributed to the anthropologist Gilberto Freyre) have been debunked, and racial discrimination and structural violence have increasingly been recognized as very real social maladies.

¹²John Cunha Comerford's (1999) ethnography of rural sociality in western Bahia shows that small farmers use the term luta (‘fight’) in reference to everyday efforts to make a living against all odds. The term already has a kind of revolutionary potential in Northeastern Brazil; it links everyday poverty to underlying social antagonisms.

¹³Palmares, located in the present state of Alagoas, was a seventeenth-century quilombo, the most famous in Brazilian history, which was comprised of thousands of escaped slaves and indigenous communities united under a ruler. Under the famous leadership of Ganga Zumba and his nephew, Zumbi, Palmares existed as a state within a state, resisting colonial military incursions for nearly 100 years until 1710.

¹⁴The program leadership was not certain about the details of such projects, and at one point asked me, the cultural anthropologist, to help them isolate those African cultural traits that could be fortified by paying for courses (e.g. in the Afro-Brazilian martial art, capoeira) in each village. I disappointed them in this regard.

Additional information

Aaron Ansell is a cultural anthropologist (PhD 2007, University of Chicago) with a regional specialty in Northeast Brazil and topical interests in democracy, patronage and capitalism. His scholarly work bridges the divide between expressive and material culture by analyzing the linguistic aspects of political economy. Ansell's upcoming book, Zero hunger: political culture and antipoverty policy in Northeast Brazil, argues that state policies that seek to help marginalized rural people often run afoul when they misrecognize rural people's informal democratic practices.